From symbol of hope to incarnation of sleaze, lies and greed: This week marks 20 years since Tony Blair became Labour leader. Now Dominic Sandbrook asks - has any former PM sunk so low?

Tony Blair with wife Cherie on the day he became Labour leader on July 21, 1994

Exactly 20 years ago, a new star burst into the British political firmament.

When Tony Blair became Labour leader on July 21, 1994, his advent was widely seen as the beginning of a bright new era in British politics.

Here was a young, fresh moderniser, untainted by association with the past, who would surely drag his party — and his country — into the 21st century.

Today, we all know what happened to those optimistic expectations.

Two decades on, Mr Blair’s star could hardly have plunged to lower depths. His story has become perhaps the ultimate political morality tale, and far from being remembered as a symbol of youthful innocence, he now seems the incarnation of spin, sleaze and naked self-interest.

Of course, the journey from saviour to scapegoat is one of the most familiar political trajectories of all. However, the extraordinary thing about Tony Blair’s 20-year odyssey is that it has been so drastic and so complete.

Thanks to the endless corruption scandals, the cash for peerages row, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the shameless pursuit of post-premiership wealth, his image is now so tarnished that it takes real effort to recall the atmosphere in July 1994, when he was elected to succeed the late John Smith as leader of the Labour Party.

After 15 years in power, the Tories were reeling from crisis to crisis. Thanks to the debacle of Black Wednesday in 1992, when Britain had been forced into a humiliating withdrawal from Europe’s Exchange Rate Mechanism, John Major’s government was sinking fast.

And so, even though there were three years to go until the General Election, Mr Blair’s ascent to the premiership seemed inevitable from the moment his party anointed him.

Never in living memory had any Opposition leader enjoyed such a honeymoon.

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Right from the start, Mr Blair was a brilliant communicator, who said precisely what he knew people wanted to hear.

He promised to ‘lift the spirit of the nation’. He said it was wrong that we were spending ‘billions of pounds keeping able-bodied people idle’, and wrong that we were ‘wasting hundreds of millions of pounds on bureaucrats and accountants in the NHS’.

He promised to crack down on drugs and crime, to give all children the educational chances they deserved, and to get rid of the ‘quango state’.

Of course, talk is cheap. But when he became Prime Minister three years later, Tony Blair had probably the best inheritance of any new government in the 20th century.

Not only was the economy buoyant, but the Thatcher governments of the Eighties had taken most of the difficult decisions for him. There was no need to confront the unions, the IRA or the Soviet Union — all had effectively been beaten.

What an opportunity! What an historic chance to prepare Britain for the competitive global marketplace of the 21st century: to reform our welfare and education systems, to revive our manufacturing base, to rebuild our infrastructure, to reinvigorate our democracy!

Tony Blair poses with wife Cherie and children (left to right) Nicky, Kathryn and Euan outside 10 Downing Street after Labour's landslide victory in the 1997 General Election. When he became Prime Minister, Blair had probably the best inheritance of any new government in the 20th century

The new administration could, for instance, have invested heavily in apprenticeships, which would have slashed welfare bills and reinvigorated manufacturing industry in declining areas such as the West Midlands and the North-East.Instead, Mr Blair merely shifted hundreds of thousands of people on to disability benefit, costing the taxpayer a staggering £7 billion a year by the time he left office in 2007.

And instead of rebalancing our economy away from the South-East, Mr Blair bet the house on the City of London, leaving us with a wretchedly lopsided economy that was all too vulnerable to the global financial crisis that struck a few months after his retirement.

Looking back, in fact, the real story of the Blair years was one of shattering disappointment.

Mr Blair’s first term, as even he admitted in his execrable memoir A Journey, was sacrificed to the pursuit of short-term headlines. His second was consumed in the disastrous blunder of invading Iraq; his third was cut short by the endless feuding with his former comrade Gordon Brown.

One by one, the promises made in that first speech in 1994 were systematically broken. Far from being cut, for example, NHS bureaucracy ballooned as Whitehall imposed a new regime of rigid targets. Between 1999 and 2009, the number of NHS managers increased by an amazing 82 per cent.

As for scrapping the quango state, forget it. In ten years under Tony Blair, there was a 41 per cent increase in the number of quangos, which by then cost the taxpayer £124 billion a year.

Mr Blair’s first term, as even he
admitted in his execrable memoir A Journey, was sacrificed to the
pursuit of short-term headlines. His second was consumed in the
disastrous blunder of invading Iraq; his third was cut short by the
endless feuding with his former comrade Gordon Brown

But the deeper roots of this failure went back to the New Labour culture that Mr Blair established immediately upon becoming leader in 1994.

Right from the start, he and his henchmen, notably the bullying Alastair Campbell, encouraged a culture of shameless mendacity and obsessive control-freakery.

In power, these tendencies became exaggerated. Cabinet government gave way to sofa government and television showmanship took precedence over parliamentary democracy.

The economy, buoyed by the unsustainable expansion of personal credit, was still booming, while the Tories were having something of a mid-life crisis, so Mr Blair coasted to victory in election after election. All the time, however, spin and sleaze were eating away at the pillars of British public life.

The fact that Mr Blair himself was largely responsible is surely not in doubt. Today, some of his former admirers believe that he literally went mad. The former Labour Foreign Secretary, Lord Owen (an ex-doctor), has diagnosed narcissistic personality disorder, while the novelist Robert Harris, who used to play tennis with Blair, believes that he suffers from a ‘messiah complex’.

My own view is rather different. I don’t think Mr Blair went mad. I think he remains what he always was: a narcissistic, preening showman, the lead singer of a college rock band who modelled himself on Mick Jagger, craved the approval of the crowd and came to believe his own publicity.

He belongs, I think, to a long and dishonourable political tradition: the posturing populist who puts his own interests before those of the nation, like those great mountebanks Benjamin Disraeli and David Lloyd George — both of whom, like Mr Blair, built well-deserved reputations for egotism and avarice.

The tragedy, though, is that Tony Blair did much more damage. Many of the ills of contemporary Britain, not least the parlous state of British manufacturing and our over-dependence on the casino capitalism of the City of London, can be laid directly at his door.

And that is before you even begin to contemplate the festering sores of Iraq and Afghanistan, which did terrible damage to our reputation abroad.

Mr Blair shakes hands with former U.S. President George W. Bush in the Rose Garden of the White House in April 2004 after meeting in the Oval Office to discuss the war in Iraq

Of course you cannot blame Mr Blair alone for the current state of Iraq, divided, bomb-scarred and, thanks to the advance of Islamic militancy, lurching towards cataclysmic partition.

But because of his reckless folly in invading without bothering to lay the foundations for the future, he bears a considerable share of the responsibility, and any decent man would surely hang his head in sorrow and repentance.

Of course, there had been plenty of dissembling, evasive, even mendacious politicians before, but never had there been one so determined to bend the truth to his own ends.

Even during the late Nineties, when Mr Blair was accused of twisting his policies after getting a big donation from the Formula One tycoon Bernie Ecclestone, there was a sense of growing public disquiet about his honesty — or lack of it.

But the war in Iraq was a disaster for the image of public life in this country.

Millions of people, horrified by the allegations that the government had ‘sexed up’ an intelligence dossier on the case for war, concluded that government ministers — indeed, all politicians — were inherently untrustworthy.

Of course you cannot blame Mr Blair
alone for the current state of Iraq, divided, bomb-scarred and, thanks
to the advance of Islamic militancy, lurching towards cataclysmic
partition. But because of
his reckless folly in invading without bothering to lay the foundations
for the future, he bears a considerable share of the responsibility, and
any decent man would surely hang his head in sorrow and repentance.

If our politicians could lie to get us into a war, the thinking went, then why should we believe them about anything else?

As a result, I think Mr Blair did more than anybody else in modern British history to destroy the relationship between the governors and the governed. By his final term, even his own closest colleague, who had long since become his most bitter rival, simply no longer trusted a word he said.

‘There is nothing that you could say to me now,’ Gordon Brown, frustrated at his old friend’s refusal to step aside, told Blair after the 2005 election, ‘that I would ever believe.’

Little wonder, then, that Mr Blair’s reputation inside his own party remains at rock bottom, or that he is rarely invited back to address Labour conferences.

In fairness, with his orange tan and mid-Atlantic accent, he would surely strike a weirdly exotic note at the gathering of the comrades.

Many Labour members now argue that, far from realising the ideals of socialism, championing the underdog and sticking up for ordinary working-class Britons, Mr Blair simply used their party to propel himself into power and line his own pockets.

I can’t say I blame them. Indeed, I wonder what ordinary Labour activists in Sedgefield, Mr Blair’s old working-class constituency in County Durham, now make of his globe-trotting, money- grubbing antics.

The astonishing thing, though, is that far from slinking into obscurity, Mr Blair continues to court the limelight.

Only last month, after Ukip’s sensational showing in the European and local elections, he took it upon himself to lecture the British people about the joys of the European Union.

He is evidently oblivious to the fact that whenever he speaks out in support of something (such as, say, plunging into a new Middle Eastern adventure in Syria, as he urged last year), he makes it far more likely that voters will recoil in horror.

Given that most senior figures in the Labour Party seem to be trying to forget that he ever existed, you might have expected him to retreat into the shadows, following the example of his predecessor, Sir Anthony Eden, after the debacle of the Suez Crisis in 1956.

Instead, in an apparent bid to prove that he lacks an iota of shame, irony or self-knowledge, Mr Blair decided that it was his mission to bring peace to the Middle East. Well, given that Israel and the Palestinians have spent the past week firing rockets at each other, we all know how that worked out.

On top of that, Mr Blair has spent the past seven years whoring himself around the world. He is now worth an estimated £30 million — although he insisted this week the figure was nearer £20 million — having been said to have taken £125,000 from the Chinese for a single speech on philanthropy, as well as a reported $13 million from Kazakhstan’s autocratic president Nursultan Nazarbayev in return for unspecified ‘advice’. Blair denied making any personal profit.

Demonstrators protest outside the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre in London where former prime minister Tony Blair give evidence to the Iraq Chilcott Inquiry

His other clients, by the way, include the repressive, super-rich regimes in Kuwait and Qatar, and the vastly wealthy China Investment Corporation. I can barely bring myself to imagine what the high-minded men and women who founded the Labour Party would make of it.

Of course, other former prime ministers have worked the lecture circuit, but none has ever done so with such single-minded determination to line his pockets, and none has ever prostituted the dignity of the British premiership with such reckless, self-interested amorality.

Even many of Mr Blair’s closest political colleagues have been shocked by his naked greed for money.

‘There is no question,’ admitted his former Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, this month, ‘that he has damaged his reputation. The money . . .some of his contacts . . . some aspects of the way he’s spent his life have damaged his reputation.’

For my part, I often think of our former Prime Minister as a cross between Mr Toad and Arthur Daley: shameless, unrepentant endlessly touting his shop-soiled wares, impervious to criticism.

The veteran Tory MP Sir Peter Tapsell recently suggested that, in the light of the bloody chaos in Iraq, Mr Blair ought to be impeached and put on trial before the House of Lords.

Entertaining as the prospect sounds, it strikes me as a little unlikely. Where Mr Blair’s story will end, though, is anybody’s guess.

His little band of partisans dwindles by the year; if he carries on at the current rate, he will be friendless by the end of the decade.

It is true that political reputations tend to wax and wane. But never, I think, has any former prime minister’s star sunk quite so low — especially when you consider the gushing, almost adolescent adulation that greeted Mr Blair’s elevation as Labour leader.

Perhaps the supreme irony is that, right from the start, Tony Blair governed with a keen eye on the history books. ‘A day like today is not a day for soundbites,’ he famously said on the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, ‘but I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders.’

But now, 20 years after he first seized the attention of the British public, it seems certain that history’s verdict will be withering. Indeed, perhaps never in our modern history has so much potential been so tragically wasted.

In the past two decades, Mr Blair has done dreadful damage not just to public life in this country, but to his own reputation.

The only thing that has not suffered, of course, is his bank balance. And that, I think, says it all.